An Interview with Jerome McGann on the Manfred Symposium

What were some of the challenges of adapting Manfred to a staged reading? How did you go about choosing what/not to cut? I’ve been wrestling with the problem of a staged Manfred for more than 40 years. During that period I’ve tried out several presentational approaches. The one I published a few years ago with Pasdeloup Press, Byron’s Manfred, was the most minimal. That work came after I’d spent a number of years writing a kind of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern set of scenes drawn out of Byron’s life that I imagined would run simultaneously with Manfred on a revolving stage. But I gradually lost interest in that approach as a consequence of many conversations with my old friend Virgil Burnett, who was one of the driving agents in the founding of Cain’s Company at Chicago (when my interest in “unplayable plays” actually began in the late 60s.) A primary consideration for the minimalist Byron’s Manfred was that it not run more than 60-70 minutes, without intermission. It actually grew out of an imagination of a production that would feature spectacular visual and audial stage effects – scrim projections, all kinds of spectacle translations of what in Manfred were strictly poetic events (Manfred is, after all, a “Dramatic Poem”). But the more Virgil and I talked about it, the clearer it became how like Manfred was to ancient Greek theatre, and therefore how stripped down it ought to be – to let the poetry come through. Byron was reading Aeschylus closely at the time and ancient Greek drama was certainly the model for what he came to call his project in “mental theatre”, though he went after it by deploying, in most of his plays, the conventions of Shakespearean and Elizabethan drama. But not Manfred. His so-called lyric poem “Prometheus”, written just before he began Manfred, is clearly a pastiche chorus from a Greek play, probably meant to be seen as a recovered chorus from one of the lost plays of Aeschylus’ Prometheus cycle.

Given his rich corpus, it’s a little unusual to have a Byron-themed symposium around one text only. What were some of the benefits of bringing together such a wide range of scholars to focus on a single work of Byron’s?Well Manfred isn’t just any “single work” from the Romantic Period. It is the pivotal work in Byron’s corpus, the hinge between the “dark” tales and the serio-comic masterpieces in ottava rima. Like Blake’s Milton, it is the work where Byron puts himself and his failures on the line in the most dramatic way, using that act as a vehicle for bringing a severe critical judgment to poetry itself and the imaginative pretensions of Romantic expression. As such, it is one of the greatest works of Romanticism as well as one of the most significant. For the next 100 years it was the English Romantic work that was most consequential for European art, poetry, and philosophy.

Thinking about the nuances and tensions that you teased out of the play within your keynote address, how would you say your long-standing reading of Manfred has changed recently? I didn’t have a “long-standing reading” and I still don’t. Manfred is as difficult and provoking a work as any I know. I didn’t feel capable of writing about it until the late 90s – the first time was in the Nottingham Foundation Lecture of 1998, “Byron and Wordsworth”. It was after that, in fact, that I began thinking again about how to stage it. All those wrestlings ended, for a time, with the 2009 publication of Byron’s Manfred. But then Manfred went into hibernation for me once again . . . until last year when Dino Felluga launched his COVE initiative and asked me to edit the Manfred unit. That drew me back – this time, into an effort to annotate the text in the closest and most minute ways. The lecture at the symposium was the result: Manfred looked at through a series of exemplary passages that mark the work as a network of visionary intransigence.

Do you think some of the romantic issues that the symposium investigated spoke to more contemporary concerns around politics, social issues, climate change, gender etc.? For example, what are the rhetorical and/or political implications of Manfred—a play about a powerful, male conjurer—in light of Mr. Trump’s presidency in the US? How might one wealthy ruler speak to the other? One of the topics Manfred takes up is the difficulty of being truthful – not the difficulty of telling the truth, but the difficulty — and therefore the moral obligation – of trying to be truthful. Jesus said it was more difficult for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Manfred’s corollary is that it is just as difficult for a rich man to try to be truthful. Manfred is after all a very rich and privileged man. Donald Trump was elected president in good part by flaunting untruthfulness, which comes to him as easily as the leaves to the tree. Manfred is not a work he would care to read, least of all try to understand. But that may be one reason why we should find it important, perhaps even uplifting.

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